Cold Rice Pudding

Milk is doing two jobs at once: it's the cooking liquid and it's most of the flavour, so don't reach for a low-fat version thinking it's lighter — thin milk gives a thin pudding, full stop. Whole milk is the baseline; if you want to push it, you can swap a splash for single cream, but don't go further, because too much fat early on coats the rice and slows how much liquid it can actually absorb — you'll end up with soupy pudding and tired rice.

Pudding rice is short-grain, round, starchy — the opposite criterion to the rice you'd use for a pilaf. The starch on the outside is the whole point: it swells, bursts a little, and thickens the milk around it, which is how you get body without flour or eggs. Risotto rice (arborio, carnaroli) will do at a pinch, it's built the same way — roundish and starchy — but it's a bit firmer-grained and may want a few extra minutes at the gentle-simmer stage. Long-grain rice is the wrong tool entirely: it's bred to stay separate and dry, which is exactly what you don't want in a pudding.

Vanilla pod, scraped and then left in the pan to finish cooking alongside the rice, gives you flavour in two forms — the seeds, rubbed into the sugar so they don't clump and sink, and the spent pod itself, still giving off oils as it simmers. Vanilla extract will get you flavour without the visual flecks and without the slow infusion, so use it if that's what's in the cupboard, but know you're trading a little depth for convenience. Vanilla sugar, if you keep a jar of it going (sensible — bury spent pods in your sugar tin), does both jobs for the price of one.

The almonds get blanched twice in quick succession — once to loosen the skin, once to finish lifting it — because the brown skin itself is bitter and leathery, and left on it would sit in your mouth as grit rather than crunch. Chop them roughly, not fine: a ground almond disappears into the pudding and you've wasted the texture it was there to provide. No almonds, or an allergy in the house — toasted flaked hazelnuts or a few crushed amaretti biscuits will give you the same job: something with a bite, stirred in cold.

Double cream is non-negotiable in its fat content, though not in its ceremony: whip it only to soft peaks, because stiff cream folded into pudding sits in lumps rather than melting through, and you lose the point of adding it, which is lightness, not more richness. Fold it in close to serving — within the hour — because whipped cream left standing starts to weep and separate, and a pudding that's been waiting since this morning with its cream already in will have gone watery at the edges by teatime.

A pinch of salt at the end isn't there to be tasted as salt — it's there so the sugar and vanilla taste like more of themselves, the same reason you'd salt a custard. Leave it out and the pudding isn't wrong, just a shade flatter, like tea without milk — still tea, just missing something it's used to.